Welcome to Sohail's world of Learning!

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Now this is what I call, a perfect gender dominated session. With almost 150 girls, I was given a task to discuss the co-existence of Freedom and Responsibility. Although, the session was not meant to be an interactive one - the laughter gave me the perfect feedback - Loved the session...

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Many corporate giants are finding it hard to survive while others have already closed the shop. Survival is again the key issue.

Representing training community – let me tell you that the first budget that ever cuts off in such times is that for trainings.

Enough is enough – Cutting training budget is not only shameful, but beyond common sense. Let me be more precise. What a team management does, when a particular soccer or a cricket team is not presenting well… Do they call off their entire training budget, insanely downsize and pray for a miracle to happen… Absolutely NO – as they have enough brains.

Now let’s come to the corporate side… training get synonyms to crime in times of recession. Downsizing (in the name of right-sizing is the first step) – seems rational because we always over hire (look for my next post for this subject). Do you realize how stupid this is…! You are asking your employees to do, what they have been doing – and so they will get more of what they have been getting (something that got you stuck today)…

The most beautiful, challenging, yet thrilling dimension of my training career comes from my interaction with children. They are smart, creative, simple and honest. These four attributes are, however, quite rare in most modern workplaces. Although, we do invest a lot in making our employees creative, yet the environment we provide is simply contradictory.Let me share few observations, I’ve made, while training those whiz kids:

They ask for every damn thing – no matter how expensive it is. They even don’t care about who have the actual possession of it… They just want it, and so they demand. We - the grown-up waste most of our lives, thinking whether to ask for it or not!

They always want to win, without hurting someone else. They don’t create troubles for others in order to pursuit good for themselves… still they want to win. Are we still that eager, yet not greedy!

They are happy, with no particular reason. Searching for reasons to be happy is an adult nonsense.

They get bored quickly. They hate doing the same thing over and over again. This disenchantment gives them the hunger to find new things to do, or at least new ways of doing the same old thing.

They forget grievances, and move on with building stronger relationship. They fight, they yell – yet they settle issues, 100 times faster then the adults. What a shame for us.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. Now, may I request you to do something about it!

Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the side of a deserted road.Suddenly a brand new Porsche screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Hauler wrist-watch, and a Pierre Cardin tie, gets out and asks the Shepherd:

"If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?"

The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies: "Okay."

The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to the mobile-fax, enters a NASA Webster, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with logarithms and pivot tables, then prints out a 10 page report on his high-tech mini-printer.

He turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1,586 sheep here."The shepherd cheers, "That's correct, you can have your sheep." The young man makes his pick and puts it in the back of his Porsche.

The shepherd looks at him and asks: "If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?"The young man answers: "Yes, why not".The shepherd says, "You are a Management Consultant from a top-notch consultancy like McKinsey, etc..."How did you know?" asks the surprised young man."Very simple," answers the shepherd."First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and third, you don't understand anything about my business...